Williams announced earlier this week that Pat Symonds is to join it as its new technical chief as replacement for Mike Coughlan.

The move was made on the back of a disappointing start to the campaign for the Grove-based outfit, which has yet to score a point so far this year.

Maldonado does not believe that Symonds’ arrival is going to inject a miraculous answer for the team’s woes, but he is more optimistic about how things will develop over time.

“With Pat, it is going to be very interesting,” explained the Venezuelan. “He is new in the team and will need some time to make everything work together.

“But he has been very successful in the past and is quite good – so I hope we can improve together, work very hard and before the end of the season achieve something very good.”

Although Williams has struggled this year, Maldonado thinks that the backroom staff in place already are good enough to keep pushing things forward. “I have been working with all the technical people in the team – and we have tried to solve the problems. Sometimes we struggle to solve them, but many times we have been quite good at gaining the solutions.

“Maybe that is going to help the team to keep improving. Or maybe not. Who knows? I hope it is going to help, fingers crossed.”

Maldonado also thinks that it will only take a small improvement – of just a few tenths of a second – to make a big difference to the team’s results.

“With just half a second in qualifying, you start a bit further forward,” he said. “Our race pace is very consistent.

“Maybe it is not the quickest, but we are one of the most consistent which is quite good. Degradation for us is our strongest point.

“Last year I used to manage very well the race situation, I managed quite well that, and hopefully with more performance in qualifying we can be consistently in the points.”